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How Internet Data Centers Waste Power
Rick Zeman writes "The New York Times has extensively surveyed and analyzed data center power usage and patterns. At their behest, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company analyzed energy use by data centers and found that, on average they were using only 6 percent to 12 percent of the electricity powering their servers to perform computations. The rest was essentially used to keep servers idling and ready in case of a surge in activity that could slow or crash their operations. 'Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants.' In other words, 'A single data center can take more power than a medium-size town.' This is the price being paid to ensure everyone has instant access to every email they've ever received, or for their instant Facebook status update. Data Center providers are finding that they can't rack servers fast enough to provide for users' needs: A few companies say they are using extensively re-engineered software and cooling systems to decrease wasted power. Among them are Facebook and Google, which also have redesigned their hardware. Still, according to recent disclosures, Google's data centers consume nearly 300 million watts and Facebook's about 60 million watts. Many of these solutions are readily available, but in a risk-averse industry, most companies have been reluctant to make wholesale change, according to industry experts."
"Buy our product or we'll agitate for standards that make them mandatory." It's shit like this that annoys me mightily about the NYT.
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Using VMWare or other similar technologies, you can dramatically cut the amount of the energy you need to power your servers. You can even take advantage of on-demand servers, so that if you do suddenly become busy, it'll power up more hardware to handle the load. Great for optimizing around a 9-5 workday.
>This is the price being paid to ensure everyone has instant access to every email they've ever received, or for their instant Facebook status update.
Way to trivialize users' needs.
Crikes.
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I have no idea how the URL got mangled when Timothy moved the anchor text to a different part of the article, but here's the correct link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html?hpw&pagewanted=all
And since when does a tech site need to spell out "millions" and "billions"? Are we not able to grasp mega and giga?
Oh, and the little shitty comment "This is the price being paid to ensure everyone has instant access to every email they've ever received, or for their instant Facebook status update" by the submitter is totally uncalled for. That's not what it's about, but it's the reaction the NYT is looking for. Reload these comments at -1, you'll see the submitter's "First post!" comment there. What an idiot.
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I wonder if the excess servers could be left off, and during rush periods, they could be turned on via IPMI?
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The most ironic point: "Should we discover (as we undoubtedly would) that tens of thousands of copies of today's NYT were printed, delivered, and sold to subscribers who never read Glanz's report, do we conclude that the NYT needs a new and less-wasteful business model?"
There are so many aspects left unexplored. Part of the problem is that power is also wasted on inefficient code. Bad abstractions and poor data structures. Reasons schedule pressure and untrained monkeys doing coding in PHP. It is too much focus on the ones running the data centers, part of the problem is who they are buying their software of.
This article is simply trying to make news where there isn't any. Of course only a fraction of the power consumed goes into actual computations. For starters you need to account for cooling. Roughly speaking for every watt of server power load, you nede to account for 1 watt of cooling energy. This essentially halves the potential efficiency. In addition to that, you need to account for the amount of power it takes just to maintain state when you talking about a data center of that scale. Non-volitle memory requires and consumes power just to retain its current values. Unline Facebook and Google, most datacenters do not have 100% control over the hardware and software being run. Additionally datacenters often charge for power, space, etc and the client simply pays for what they use. In many instances efficiency is not for the datacenter to determine and one could argue that it may not even be in the datacenter's financial interest. Great strides have been made in scaling power consumption to fit computational demand but this is more of a hardware/software issue than a datacenter issue.
This is the reason there is a race for high performance chips that draw little power. Your tablet may sip power and take a few seconds to render a Facebook page, but the server sending milliions of pages needs to sip little power too. Whoever makes the best server chips wins.
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A server is a sort of bulked-up desktop computer, minus a screen and keyboard, that contains chips to process data.
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Google's numbers are especially tame. 300 million watts (total) is far below one watt per user (gmail alone has at least 350 million accounts). Certainly if you use Google services on your 30-watt laptop, you use more power than Google uses to serve you. According to Google, "in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than Google uses to answer your query."
Since Google offers almost all services for free, it has a strong incentive to minimize resources per user. I expect the paid services are the ones that use the bulk of the energy, but all data centers together are still a tiny fraction of total worldwide power usage.
This is lovely. Let's worry about problems that don't exist, as if we don't have enough catastrophes to worry about.
Power is money. As long as there is a somewhat unhampered economy in the locus of data centers (and there is), then every entrepreneur will attempt to economize power usage. You don't have to worry about it because the entrepreneurs that use power efficiently will eat the lunch of those that do not, ceteris paribus (all other things equal).
Ipso facto this problem will solve itself. Case closed.
In fact, now that I speculate on the possible reasons for publicity like this to be drummed up, it is to campaign for government regulations that will instruct entrepreneurs how they 'must' handle such a problem. Unfortunately nobody can write such regulations because they cannot foresee every circumstance and possibility, much less predict the future. Nobody on this earth can even tell a single other person what ideal type and amount of preparation is for power efficiency considerations. This is why we have economic calculation.
If such regulations are enacted, ipso facto they will cause the problem itself.
Liberty.
because that would mean absolutly every one would have everything not only in the cloud (a horible idea) but in one cloud security and stability nightamare. one bomb could kill the internet.
but if they do build your suggestion they need to name it the multivac
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First post? ...on my own submission? LOL.
No no; you see you made the mistake of shutting down your server between the post and when it was put up by slashdot to save energy. You are just too slow to achieve internet time like Google or Facebook and will never make it in the market. Let this be a lesson.
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Take the case of me and Google. My share of their power is about 1W electric (that's usually about 3w thermal).
However, I estimate that their maps and local business info features alone easily save me at least a couple of hundred miles per year of driving. That would be about 10 gallons of gasoline per year, which is 38 W thermal that I'm not burning thanks to the info they're providing. Google provides at least a 10 to 1 payback in energy savings just for this one case.
I'm part of the problem. Wish I wasn't, but I don't seem to have any choice.
I run a small web site, and if it goes down, there are various consequences in my personal and professional life that can be extremely annoying and embarrassing. To stay sane, I need the site to have good uptime. Over the years, this has caused me to gradually migrate to more and more expensive webhosting, now ~$100/mo.
The average load on my dedicated server is extremely low, so it's basically like one of the extremely wasteful boxes described in TFA. My site is basically I/O-intensive: I serve big PDF files. In terms of CPU, I'm sure the site would run fine on a low-end ARM, or as one of a dozen sites running off of the same Celeron chip. So by comparison with either of those hypothetical, energy-efficient setups, virtually all of the electrical power is being wasted. I'm a small fry, but there are millions of sites like mine, so I'm sure it adds up. (It would be interesting to know how much of total server-center power consumption comes from the "long tails" of the distribution such as Google and Facebook, and what percentage from cottage industries like me.)
There are basically two problems. (1) Nobody will sell me high-reliability webhosting on low-end hardware. The only way to get energy-efficient hardware is to get cheap webhosting. I've tried cheap webhosting. Cheap webhosts have low reliability and nonexistent customer service. (2) Sometimes you get spikes in demand, and you want some excess capacity to be able to handle it without crashing the server. Maybe you get slashdotted. Actually, in my case one thing that has been a problem is that some people apparently run IE plugins that are supposed to accelerate large downloads, by opening multiple connections with the server. When these people hit my server and download a large PDF, the effect is very much like a DOS attack. My logs show one IP address using 300 Mb of throughput to download a 3 Mb PDF. I've written scripts that lock these bozos out ASAP, but on a low-end machine, these events would bring my server to its knees instantly.
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that's how they're designed (from someone who's designed and executed datacentre solutions). I got out of the game not long before the AMD Opteron 4100 series came out (mid 2010), but at 5.83W per core they're a pretty damn smart solution even by current standards. You're talking about server power consumption of WAY LESS than .001W per request. Probably 5,000 requests are processed before the thing drinks a Watt. If my Atom-powered netbook could handle that kind of workload I would be well happy.
There's nothing wrong with datacentres sitting idle, the "wrong" comes into it when people burn 500W on a PC with 19" monitor just to scroll down Facebook.
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I know the term is horribly abused on a regular basis, but that's the whole point of cloud computing. It looks like a horrible idea because today it usually is, but eventually we'll get used to it and figure out how to make it work most of the time and then we can have a lot less idle resources as they can just be turned off. Even if it doesn't get you entirely out of colocated resources, if it can decrease the amount of hardware you have to have lying around doing nothing most of the time there's a place for it.
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This is one major reason that companies (even very large companies with "money to spare") are moving towards virtualization with incredible speed.
I'm not going to go digging for numbers right now, but the statistics show that something like 100 percent of Fortune 100 companies use virtualization, and perhaps 85-90% of Fortune 500 companies.
The larger virtualization solutions will actually take the servers that are idle, migrate them to another host machine, and power down/suspend the "extra" machine(s) that was/were being used during their core business hours.
Virtualization also allows for spikes in cpu/network, and then can take that power back when everyone goes home (a print server, an intranet web server, a domain controller, etc). So, physical machines actually DO get turned off when they aren't being taxed, and with more and more "software defined networking" the interconnects between systems can be scaled and moved also.
Now, I don't know how the big players are using this (e.g. Amazon, VMware, Rackspace, Google). I can't see inside their datacenters, but one would think that something like AWS would have a huge stake in saving power by turning off idle instances and moving VMs. Not only for the power savings from the server directly, but for the (approx) 30-40 percent more energy that it takes to cool the physical machines.
It's also worth noting that larger companies are putting their datacenters in areas with plentiful (cheap) power. Places like Washington state, with hydroelectric power and a cooler average ambient temperature, allow for a huge savings on power right off the bat. Add things like dynamic scaling of server and network hardware, lights-out datacenters, and better designed cooling systems (look at Microsoft's ideas), and there is a huge power savings across the board.
How much energy does the NYT use to print paper copies of the newspaper, distribute and deliver them, harvest the trees and process the paper? Now compare that with the energy that the online NYT uses. Which allows for more people to view the publication for less energy? I'm positive that it is the electronic version.
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This is the same "problem" that faces airline companies, taxi drivers, power companies, cell network operators. Consumers pay for these services by usage and so total revenue is proportional to average use but the costs are heavily skewed towards capital costs and so are proportional to the peak load that you can service. In that case, there's a fundamental tradeoff -- either we have to degrade service when demand hits the 95th percentile (just as an example) or we have to figure out a way to pay for the extra capital investment that's not needed 95% of the time.
There's a few alternatives you can do:
(1) Overprovision and soak it up into the price structure for all consumers. This is what most power companies do -- they build enough power generating capacity for peak load and then charge a bit more per KWH to make up for the increased outlay.
(2) Overprovision and charge extra at peak. This is the airline solution -- they always have service available but under contention the last few seats are exorbitantly expensive. Essentially those that need peak service are paying to leave a few seats open all the time in case they need them.
(3) Don't overprovision: this is the taxi solution. This means that service degrades significantly under peak demand -- anyone trying to get a cab home on a Saturday night in a major city has experienced this. Those that do get a cab pay the usual fare, everyone else waits around a while. This is also the solution that California has routinely deployed for their inability to provide peak power during heat spells -- same price for everyone but rolling blackouts for the unlucky few.
That's it -- there aren't any clean answers when you are making compromises between peak availability and average efficiency. You've either got to pay for the extra capacity when you don't need it or else you have to suffer when you don't have the capacity when you do need it.